The late Bernard Malamud’s resonant maxim “All men are Jews” might have served as subtitle for this harrowing exploration of the collision of personal conscience with historical circumstance: the third novel and best yet from Norman (The Bird Artist, 1994, etc.). Narrator DeFoe Russet, orphaned since the death of his parents in a zeppelin crash, works as a guard in a private museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside his uncle (and former guardian) Edward, a vigorous middle-aged sensualist who—the more reserved DeFoe realizes—was “living tenfold what I could.” DeFoe’s cramped horizons are broadened by his loving relationship with Imogen Linny, the attractive caretaker of a small Jewish cemetery in Halifax, who envies him his “ennobling” closeness to works of art. But the intimacy of the two dissipates when Imogen (“Imagine”?), fixated on the Dutch painting Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, begins believing that she herself is the woman it portrays. The year is 1938; news of Hitler’s mission to destroy Europe’s Jewry reaches Halifax through “Voice of Conscience” Ovid Lamartine’s Dateline: Europe radio broadcasts. As Imogen prepares to journey “back” to the endangered Old World, ironic parallels of Nazi rampages—even a literal “night of broken glass”—occur in DeFoe’s hitherto sheltered world, and a crime that is simultaneously an act of kindness and a probable death sentence removes him from the orbit of others struggling both to save the “deluded” Imogen and to honor her yearning to “liv[e] a true life,” even though it’s not her own. The long denouement—told in a series of letters sent home by another Nova Scotian stripped of his innocence—hauntingly details the consequences of Imogen’s willed transformation. The concepts of belonging, stewardship, “ennoblement,” “truce,” guilt, and survival are brilliantly dramatized in this breathtakingly readable novel. Wonderful fiction.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-21649-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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